The MuseuM - Oriental Instituteoi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/...2005–2006 Annu A l Repo R t 129 The MuseuM Geoff emberling This past year saw the opening of

2005–2006 AnnuAl RepoRt 129

The MuseuMGeoff emberling

This past year saw the opening of two new galleries in the museum: the Robert F. Picken Family Nubia Gallery and the Marshall and Doris Holleb Family Gallery for Special Exhibits. Each is a significant achievement in its own right, and together they represent the culmination of more than ten years of work (and an investment of more than $15 million) in the museum to build a new wing, install climate control in storerooms and galleries, and to reinstall the permanent collection in an improved display that also retains the distinctive character of the Oriental Institute — rich presentations of the archaeology and history of the ancient Near East in a wonderfully traditional setting.

The Picken Nubia Gallery is a beautiful space in which we have presented the history of ancient Nubia. The Oriental Institute’s collection of Nubian antiquities was mostly acquired during the Aswan Dam salvage campaigns of the early 1960s and is now on permanent display for the first time. Co-curated by Stephen Harvey and Bruce Williams, the exhibit displays the distinctive aesthetic of Nubian craft traditions through the millennia as well as highlighting aspects of Nubian cultural identity, including complexities of Nubia’s relationship with Egypt, and Nubian skill in archery.

We took this gallery as an opportunity for some museological innovation. Working with Barbara Ceiga, a brilliant exhibit evaluator, we conducted a survey of our current audience and a focus group of cultural leaders on the south side of Chicago. Carole Krucoff discusses these projects in the Museum Education section below; one of the most tangible results was an introductory area for the gallery that included a dramatic image and text that mentions some high points of Nubian history that have proved to inspire visitor interest.

Installing museum galleries is a much more complex process than the clean, uncluttered final result might suggest. In addition to the curators of the Picken Nubia Gallery, I would like to thank Curatorial Assistants Laura Deneke, Debora Heard, and Tom James; Editor Joan Barghusen; Head of Education Carole Krucoff; Designers Markus Dohner and Dianne Hanau-Strain; Registrars Ray Tindel and Helen McDonald; Conservators Laura D’Alessandro, Alison Whyte, and Monica Hudak; Preparators Erik Lindahl and Brian Zimerle; and exhibit evaluator Barbara Ceiga.

Thanks once again to Rita and Kitty Picken, whose continuing generosity and active interest made it possible to bring Nubia to the museum galleries. We also appreciate the generous financial support of the Joyce Foundation and the Coleman Foundation.

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Picken Nubia Gallery street pole banner (design: Keith Purvis, Art on the Loose)

the oRientAl institute 2005–2006 AnnuAl RepoRt

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130 the oRientAl institute

The Holleb Special Exhibits Gallery is the first Oriental Institute gallery exclusively dedicated to special exhibits. We plan to have two exhibits per year, an ambitious schedule for a small museum, but one that we’re excited about. The special exhibit program gives us opportunities to present exciting current research, or synthetic topics that extend across the major geographical regions of the Middle East, or to broaden the chronological and geographical range beyond what is covered in our permanent galleries. Thanks to Marshall and Doris Holleb for their continuing support and interest.

Our inaugural special exhibit was Lost Nubia, photographs taken by James Henry Breasted during a trip through Nubia in 1905–1907. Oriental Institute Archivist John Larson curated this exhibit. Thanks for the success of the exhibit and its catalog go to Jean Grant, who printed the photos by hand from an extraordinarily difficult set of glass plate and film negatives (whose condition is not surprising given their age and the field conditions under which they were developed); to Designer Markus Dohner,

Preparators Erik Lindahl and Brian Zimerle, and Curatorial Assistant Tom James.Currently on view in the Holleb Special Exhibits Gallery is Wonderful Things!, a beautiful

and intriguing exhibit of photographs of the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamun. Curated by Emily Teeter, it was designed and installed by Markus Dohner, Erik Lindahl, and Tom James.

Special exhibits are discussed in detail below by Emily Teeter, who will coordinate the special exhibit program. She also discusses our first ever podcast, which we hope will be the first of a number of audio tours that we develop for the museum in the year to come.

Bill Harms, of the University’s News Off ice , deserves a l l our thanks for his success in publicizing work of the museum.

And yet, as the reports that follow abundantly demonstrate, the museum continues a wide range of other activities even in the midst of its fast-paced exhibit installation schedule. Among the many highlights, I would mention

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Introductory graphics and text panels in the Picken Nubia Gallery (design: Dianne Hanau-Strain, Hanau-Strain Associ-ates)

Graph of museum attendance

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the training program for Iraqi conservators that was created by Laura D’Alessandro and funded by National Endowment for the Humanities in 2005; Wendy Ennes’ ongoing program to put Mesopotamia online, funded by IMLS; and the public symposium for the opening of the Picken Nubia Gallery, organized by Carole Krucoff.

The numbers looked good for the museum in 2005/2006. Attendance was 62,174, up 3.5% over last year. As the graph of attendance shows, attendance in June 2006 was up 18% over last year, which we can take to be an early sample of the effect of King Tut on attendance (by comparison, the Oriental Institute’s Annual Report for 1977 says that the first Tutankhamun exhibit increased attendance at the Oriental Institute fourfold!). We hope that continuing special exhibits and publicity will continue to increase our attendance.

The coming year promises a focus on our storerooms and catalogs. It may not be a subject that brings the public to the Institute — for that, we will have our special exhibits and education programs — but should, over time, make our collection (and our knowledge about it) more widely accessible to scholars and the general public.

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special exhibiTs

emily Teeter

Since the last Annual Report, the challenge of developing and installing special exhibits in the Holleb Special Exhibits Gallery has become a reality. We plan to work with museum staff and faculty to come up with ideas that are intellectually stimulating and in keeping with the character and role of the Oriental Institute, and having themes that will also be appealing to the general public. Another major challenge is funding the exhibits, especially taking into account that some involve staff travel and curatorial consultants in addition to the staff time, publicity costs, and the expense of printing catalogs and brochures.

Our first special exhibit, Lost Nubia: Photographs of Egypt and Sudan, 1905–07, opened on February 25, 2006, in conjunction with the opening of the Picken Nubia Gallery. The show was curated by Oriental Institute Archivist John A. Larson who pored over the approximately 1,200 images taken by the Breasted expedition to select fifty-two photos. Exhibit designer Markus Dohner designed a cube in the center of the gallery to give additional hanging space and the images were printed by Jean Grant. The images were arranged by geographical location in Egypt and Nubia. John authored a series of text panels that discussed the expedition and its goals. A catalog entitled Lost Nubia: A Centennial Exhibit of Photographs from the 1905–1907 Egyptian Expedition of the University of Chicago, designed by the Oriental Institute Publications Office, and authored by John, was ready for the opening. A banner at the door on 58th Street promoted the exhibit.

The public received this first exhibit enthusiastically. Comments from the visitors’ book include: “What a wonderfully presented exhibit! I learned so much.” “[The show] encouraged me to learn more about ancient Nubia.” “Wonderful photo exhibit. My first time visiting the Oriental Institute. I will return.” The exhibit closed on May 15, 2006. The catalog continues to be available in the Suq and from David Brown Booksellers and Oxbow Books.

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Our second special exhibit, Wonderful Things! The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun: The Harry Burton Photographs, opened on May 26 (fig. 4), not coincidentally the same day that Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs opened at the Field Museum. The show consists of fifty-one black and white Burton photos and five text panels. The images were borrowed from the Metropolitan Museum of Art through the gracious cooperation of Dorothea Arnold, the Chairman of the Department of Egyptian Art. Susan Allen, Senior Research Associate in the department, went to great lengths to make our exhibit a success. The images are digital copies of Burton’s own prints that are archived at the Metropolitan Museum. Using copies of the prints, rather than making new prints from the negatives, ensured that the images in our exhibit were as the photographer himself intended.

In the planning stage of the exhibit, Museum Director Geoff Emberling and I decided to expand its scope from simply the photos and the discovery of the tomb to the uses of photography in archaeology, the role of the images in the fame of the tomb, the Oriental Institute and the

tomb of Tutankhamun, and the “curse of Tutankhamun.” The exhibit was designed by Markus Dohner and installed by Erik Lindahl and Tom James.

Due to copyright issues, the catalog for the exhibit was produced for us by the Metropolitan Museum. The result was unexpectedly lavish and very beautiful. The introduction was written by James P. Allen and the text by Susan Allen, both former Oriental Institute students and staff members. The catalog is selling briskly, and it will continue to be stocked by the Suq after the exhibit closes.

Another temporary exhibit (May 26–December 31, 2006), The Ancient Near East in the Time of Tutankhamun, is a self-guided tour that Geoff and I developed. Our goal was to place Tutankhamun in the context of his time across the breadth of the entire ancient Near East, an aim to which our galleries are particularly well suited. We surveyed the galleries for objects contemporary with Tut (about 1330 b.c.) and then wrote brief text that relates those objects to him. The various “stops” for the tour are designated by large cartouches designed by Markus Dohner and Tom James. The script for the tour is available as a printed booklet that is available in the Suq. The tour gave us the opportunity to do our first audio tour in the form of a podcast, narrated by Ian Turvill. For the non-iPod generation, this means that the audio can be transferred without cost to a portable music device through a computer link to www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/06/060523.tut-podcast.shtml or through iTunes (http://www.apple.com/itunes/). This was an exciting development for us that led to plans for a wide variety of special interest audio tours without having to invest in expensive hardware.

special exhibiTs

Wonderful Things! exhibit banner (design: Keith Purvis, Art on the Loose)

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As with the Breasted photo show, the visitor comment book gave us helpful feedback such as: “After viewing the photo exhibit of the Tutankhamun expedition/excavation, I hope that the Oriental Institute will be able to present other photographic installations. It was fascinating.” “Very beautiful. I am a photographer myself and I know how hard it is to get photos with good lighting. And he [Burton] did not have Photoshop!” “Outstanding, important, and fabulous exhibit.”

We are continuing to plan for coming exhibits:

• Embroidering Identities: A Century of Palestinian Clothing (November 11, 2006–March 25, 2007). This exhibit is being mounted as a collaborative effort with the Palestine Heritage Center, Bethlehem, which is supplying garments and accessories that are not represented in our own collection. The show explores how people express their identity through clothing, and how that tradition has been eroded through globalization (think blue jeans, t-shirts, and baseball caps). The exhibit consists of ensembles from different regions of Palestine. Iman Saca is our consulting curator.

• An exhibit of children’s crafts created under a generous grant from the Joyce Foundation will be installed in the gallery in spring 2007.

• The fall exhibit is European Cartographers and the Ottoman World, 1500–1750: Maps from the Collection of O. J. Sopranos. It will be on view from November 2, 2007, to March 2, 2008. Ian Manners, a geographer and former Director of the Middle East Center at the University of Texas, Austin, and the author of numerous scholarly works on the history of cartography, is the curator. Most of the maps and atlases on exhibit will be drawn from the collection of Visiting Committee member Jim Sopranos, augmented by items from Special Collections at Regenstein Library, the Newberry Library, and possibly the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The exhibit is presented in conjunction with a citywide map festival. Manners will prepare a fully-illustrated catalog with a contribution by Pinar Emiralio©lu and the assistance of Cornell Fleischer, Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies at the University of Chicago. We are confident that this will be a catalog that will have a usefulness of its own, far beyond the exhibit. We thank Jim Sopranos for all his generous cooperation in organizing this exhibit.

The schedule for temporary exhibits currently has “opportunities” that are yet to be filled. In the works are shows that shed new light on “The First Cities” dealing with early urbanism in Syria (Tell Brak and Hamoukar), an exhibit on Urartu, and others that are in the very early stages of discussion.

We are excited about the exhibits, even with the challenges of planning and funding. We are confident that they will give opportunities for collaboration with faculty, help us develop a new and expanded audience, and also motivate people to return to the galleries, to see something new, but also to revisit the permanent exhibits.

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publiciTy

emily Teeter

The joint opening of the Picken Nubia Gallery and the temporary exhibit Lost Nubia was the perfect opportunity to enhance our publicity efforts. We branched out in the placement of our paid advertising to include not only the Hyde Park Herald and Time Out Chicago, but also The Citizen and I’Ndigo, and continued notices on Chicago Public Radio. Colorful street-pole banners designed by the local firm Art on the Loose, featuring a segment of a tomb painting showing a procession of Nubians, gathered attention. Banners prominently announcing the two exhibits were mounted by the front door and on the west ramp. The large audience on the opening weekend (over 1,000 people), and a large percentage of new visitors were at least informal indications that the publicity program was effective.

A press preview for the Nubia exhibit was held on February 23. Among those helping with the event were Rita and Kitty Picken (who made Nubian-frog shaped cookies), Deborah Halpern, and also William Harms of the University’s News Office. Curators Stephen Harvey, Bruce Williams, and Museum Director Geoff Emberling graciously gave their time to speak to the press. The interest in the exhibit led to several radio interviews with Steve and Geoff. A major article featuring an interview with Steve appeared in the Daily Herald and another feature, “Artifacts Get a New Home,” appeared in the Chicago Tribune. The new gallery also received coverage in Time Out Chicago, The Hyde Park Herald, The Chicago Maroon, and The Citizen. The exhibit of Breasted photos of Nubia had extensive coverage in the University of Chicago Tableau and the University of Chicago Magazine.

The opening of our second special exhibit Wonderful Things! The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun: The Harry Burton Photographs coincided with the city-wide excitement over the major exhibit at The Field Museum. This timing allowed us to take advantage of the far greater publicity resources of the Field Museum, for our exhibit was listed as a Tut-related activity and was listed in many local and regional publications including feature stories in the Chicago Sun-Times.

We continue to develop a good working relationship with the Mayor’s Office of Special Events and the Chicago Office of Tourism, and as a result, they include our programs in very large run brochures. Our education department has been very resourceful developing interesting events that are compatible with any and all themes that the city promotes, thereby ensuring that we are listed with the larger museums. We have helped the city with their well-publicized Neighborhood Tours, and in June, we were selected to be a part of the Office of Tourism’s Immersion Weekend on Tutankhamun that was advertised in a brochure that was inserted into the New York Times. These publications are extremely important for reaching our audience and increasing our visitor base.

In the last year, we had a number of television producers film in the galleries, working on topics such as the rise of Persian civilization and Persepolis, Assyrian history, and several Egyptian themes.

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Lost Nubia exhibit banner (design: Keith Purvis, Art on the Loose)

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A challenge for the coming year is the search for additional funding for marketing the Oriental Institute and its programs to enable us to reach new audiences. As part of this effort, we are redesigning the visitor surveys that were done with the opening of each new gallery in the effort to evaluate the effectiveness of our marketing efforts. Although we are still, too often, referred to as a “hidden gem,” we can see from the number of visitors alone that there is growing public awareness of the museum of the Oriental Institute and its programs.

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ReGisTRaTion

Ray Tindel and helen McDonald

It was a busy year for Registration, as we worked to support museum installation, special exhibits, teaching, research projects, continuing registration of the collection, improvements in storage, and regular maintenance of the collection. All in all we have moved 30,000 objects this year.

Over one-thousand objects were considered for the Picken Nubia Gallery and nearly five hundred (488) were put on display. Registration expects to be kept busy with the changing contents of the Holleb Special Exhibits Gallery. Just over 2,100 objects were used in teaching and nearly 3,000 were the subject of research. Nearly 18,000 objects were newly registered.

We are part of the way through receiving a batch of storage cabinets, the result of another successful application to the IMLS (Institute for Museum and Library Services) by Laura D’Alessandro. So far we have two banks of Delta shelving for heavy objects and are expecting an outsize cabinet for the collection of Nubian textiles. The arrival of a further sixteen regular-sized cabinets in the next few weeks will enable the unpacking of material from Nubia from the temporary storage boxes into which it was packed when the renovation started. 462 objects have been moved to accommodate these new cabinets and some 2,214 Nubian objects have already been unpacked and re-housed.

The collections continue to be used for teaching and research. Donald Whitcomb used Islamic Nubian sherds for a class held in the autumn quarter.Stephen Harvey taught courses on Egyptian materials and technology in both the winter and

spring quarters. Some 1,360 items were used in these classes and the students wrote papers using a further 515 objects.

David Schloen and Gabrielle Novacek taught a course on Syro-Palestinian pottery in the spring quarter, using material from Megiddo and Khirbet Kerak in particular. 168 pots were used for this class.

Tanya Treptow used our unregistered collection of Islamic glazed sherds from the Iranian site of Rayy, for an MA thesis entitled “Islamic Archaeology and Museum Display.”

Gil Stein and Abbas Alizadeh have been assembling a teaching collection of Chalcolithic Iranian sherds.

Abbas Alizadeh has begun work on a book on the Persian highlights of the Museum collection for which photography has been carried out. He has also begun to study pottery from Tall i-Ghazir for a forthcoming publication.

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Gabrielle Novacek completed the drawing and study of unregistered sherds from Khirbet Kerak/Beth Yerah that will form part of her Ph.D. thesis.

Foy Scalf and Jackie Jay have been reading Demotic ostraca.Ali Scotten and G. Bohak independently examined incantation bowls. Jeni Allenby of the Palestine Costume archive visited to look at our collection of costumes. T. Boiy came to look at Seleucid tablets from Warka. Eliot Braun investigated the amount of material we had from the early stages of Megiddo with

the view to possible further study.R. Bussman visited to look at material from Abydos and Hierokonpolis.J. Dahl scanned a quantity of tablets for the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative scanning

project.Hassan Fazili visited to study the collection of unregistered Chalcolithic sherds from

Cheshmeh Ali (Iran).Eleanor Guralnick studied fragments of Khorsabad reliefs. To assist her in placing the

fragments in their original context, we took the fragments up to the galleries outside opening hours, so that she could compare them with the large reliefs on display.

L. Mallory examined Egyptian stone vessels, basalt in particular.Jon Taylor visited to examine a variety of inscribed cuneiform material for a paleographic

study.Hiroyuki Sato, Masanobu Tachibana, Kim Jeong Bae, and S. Yamada came to look at flints

from Jarmo.Karen Wilson continues to work on material from Bismaya with the occasional assistance of

Angela Altenhofen (draftsperson) and Jacob Lauinger (philologist).Clemens Reichel continues to photograph tablets for the Diyala Project with the assistance of

the project’s volunteers.Registration/Archives also continue to provide space for the scanning of Diyala material.We have loaned material to the Smart Museum for the Graphiké exhibit and to the DuSable

Museum to advertise our new Picken Nubia Gallery. Two Nubian objects have also been sent to the DuSable on long-term loan for their “Africa Speaks” gallery. Objects from a long-term loan to the Walters Art Gallery were returned to us. Both outgoing and incoming loans will continue to be a part of the work of the museum. Registration assisted Emily Teeter as she selected material from the collection for the extra case in the Joseph and Mary Grimshaw Egyptian Gallery to house pottery from the Tutankhamun embalmer’s cache.

We have answered queries on subjects as diverse as Egyptian furniture, the size of the writing tablet on one of our tomb models, whether lip or nose rings are in use on our Tell Asmar chariot model, and whether our collection contains any hypocephali (it does not).

It has been another productive year for object registration with around 18,000 pieces registered. The museum register now has over 155,000 object numbers. This year the Asiatic collection went over 100,000 object numbers. The Jarmo material from the Institute’s Prehistoric Project is now registered, as are the sherds from Robert McCormick Adams’ Akkad survey. Material from another of the Institute’s Prehistoric Project sites, Karim Shahir, is in process of registration. Progress continues to be made on registering the large volume of material from Chogha Mish and the collection of tablet casts. Over 350 fragments of Khorsabad reliefs have been registered.

These accomplishments have been made possible by the very capable and efficient efforts of museum assistant Dennis Campbell with the assistance of a wonderful group of volunteers, including Joan Barghusen, Gretel Braidwood, Hazel Cramer, Elizabeth Davidson, Mary Grimshaw, Janet Helman, Barbara Levin, Daila Shefner, Toni Smith, and Jim Sopranos. The

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volunteers have altogether contributed approximately a thousand hours of their time to Museum Registration.

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aRchives

John a. larson

In early December 2005, John Larson passed his twenty-fifth anniversary as Museum Archivist.

photographic services

During the current fiscal year, John Larson has been assisted by graduate-student assistants Justine Warren James and Tobin Hartnell, who have had the responsibility for preparing the necessary paperwork and handling all the other details that are involved in processing the requests that we receive for photographic image materials and reproduction permissions. Income from sales of Oriental Institute photographic images and permission fees for the fiscal year 2005/2006 totaled $8,363.00. The income from photo sales and reproduction fees enables us to purchase archival supplies and equipment for the Archives and for Photography.

archives

The West Basement, a Museum workspace in the Oriental Institute shared by the functions of Archives and Registry, continues to provide a work station for the ongoing Diyala Project, under the supervision of Clemens Reichel. Visiting scholars during fiscal year 2005/2006 included Jeffrey Abt and Christian Loeben. From within our own Oriental Institute community, Robert Ritner, Tanya Treptow, Karen L. Wilson, and Alexandra Witsell have conducted research using Archives materials. We would like to acknowledge the contribution of Thomas James to the successful operation of the Archives; Tom has undertaken countless tasks with thoroughness, grace, and good humor.

Recent acquisitions

I am pleased to report that we have received from Mary G. Shea the gift of a vintage newspaper featuring an article on the Tomb of Tutankhamun and an early example of Tutmania in fashion advertising.

volunteers

The following people have generously contributed of their time during fiscal year 2005/2006 and have made it possible for us to begin, continue, and complete a number of projects in the Oriental Institute Archives that would not have been possible without their willing help and unfailing good humor: Hazel Cramer, Irene Glasner, Peggy Grant, Patricia Hume, Sandra Jacobsohn, Roberta Kovitz, Bryan Moles, Lillian Schwartz, Robert Wagner, Brian Wilson, and Carole Yoshida. We are extremely grateful for the services of these dedicated volunteers, and we are pleased to

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be able to recognize them here for their efforts on behalf of the Archives. As we neared the end of the fiscal year, four student interns — Julia van den Hout, Jessica Henderson, Kaitlin Ford, and Rachel Kreiter — began work on new shelf lists for the Archives Storage Room, under the supervision of John Larson — more about this project in next year’s Annual Report.

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phoTo sTuDio

Jean Grant

The past year in the Oriental Institute Photo Lab was literally broken into two parts. The main challenge of the first part of our 2005/2006 year was to print the photos for Lost Nubia. It was decided to do the work in house because sending out the 100+ year old glass plate negatives for commercial printing was a major safety concern.

Getting the exhibit ready it became clear other things had been “lost.” First the photographer/darkroom technician (me) was out of practice (even Vladimir Horowitz practiced!). Great exhibition prints are not the result of a great negative or a machine, but good printers who know their equipment and materials. Now the second major “rub” is that so many good black and white papers for prints are no longer made! Research showed we would have to use multigrade paper. You can be sure by the time the prints were hung I had a lot more practice with this “new” material, sometimes a lot on one negative! Geoff Emberling, John Larson, and I worked to get the best out of those old glass plate negatives by James Henry Breasted and his photographers of 100+ years ago in Nubia.

Now as I mentioned our year was “broken into two parts.” It was: I broke my left ankle in two places in January, tripping on the stairs in my condo hall. Fortunately the bulk of the printing for the Lost Nubia exhibit was already completed.

The next exhibit in the Holleb Special Exhibits Gallery was also a black and white print display, curated by Emily Teeter. If you didn’t see our Wonderful Things! exhibit with photographs by Harry Burton, who did all the original black and white photos of Tut and his tomb and his artifacts and Howard Carter and all his work excavating Tutankhamun’s tomb, you will still be able to get the catalog. I recommend it as a excellent book from a photographer’s view to say nothing of the historical view.

It was done (and done well) by a different process. Burton’s glass plates were not used and prints were not newly made from those plates. The file prints which were positives (prints) were originally done by Harry Burton were now digitally scanned. A file print is usually made for the archives with each new negative. I always made sure it was the best print so if anything happened to the negative there would be a good print to make a copy negative from, provided years down the road the print had been treated well! Making prints from file prints is an interesting situation. A photographer’s negative can be printed differently than the photographer intended, but using a file print as your source means the maker is still intimately involved because he saw the final positive print, assuming it was done soon after the photo was taken. Since every time you copy something you lose a little definition, let us hope digital scanning is better.

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In coming weeks we (Tom James and I) will be doing highlight photos of other gallery objects (but all the artifacts in the Oriental Institute galleries are highlights!) for upcoming publications. After getting a review of “Superb Photos” in Ancient Egypt, the Grimshaw Egyptian Gallery highlight publication by Emily Teeter, how can I follow that? I can only try!

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conseRvaTion

laura D’alessandro

This past year saw the reinstallation of the last permanent exhibit hall, the Picken Nubia Gallery, thus officially bringing to a close the museum’s renovation and reinstallation project. During the twelve years of the project, the conservation laboratory benefited from the talents of many conservators. Oriental Institute conservators took part in a variety of activities during these years, from the relocation of the Assyrian reliefs and the seventeen-foot statue of Tutankhamun to the conservation of a fragile glass vessel. After several years of working with predominantly stone (and cement!) and ceramics, it was a welcome change to conserve the wonderful artifacts of leather and wood in the Nubian collection.

Assistant Conservator Alison Whyte spent much of the year working on the objects for the Picken Nubia Gallery. Her most challenging project involved the piecing together of a glass vessel from Ballana, Nubia, that was in over 100 tiny fragments. Her skill and perseverance paid off and the object is able now to be appreciated and enjoyed by museum visitors. As this publication goes to press, Alison is spending a few weeks in Sardis, Turkey, working as a site conservator and gaining valuable experience in wall painting conservation.

Monica Hudak, Contract Conservator, joined the staff in September. Monica, a graduate of the Buffalo State College conservation training program, came to us from the Art Institute of Chicago. Since her arrival, she has spent her time working on a variety of projects. Her first activities involved the conservation of objects intended for the Nubian installation. In particular, Monica spent many hours working on the leather saddle and quiver from Qustul, Nubia, now proudly displayed in the Picken Nubia Gallery. The state of preservation of the 2,000 year old leather is truly remarkable.

Over the past year, the conservation laboratory benefited from the skills and expertise of Jeanne Mandel, a Chicago-based conservator, who volunteered her time treating objects for both the Syro-Anatolian and Nubian galleries.

Another conservation project that is ongoing is the survey and rehousing of the Nubian textiles. The textiles, conserved and stored at the Art Institute for many years, returned to the Oriental Institute upon the completion of the building project that provided climate control to museum areas. As the new, custom-built textile cabinets from Delta Design, purchased with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), are delivered, conservation staff are carrying out a condition survey of each textile. Alison and Monica recently completed the survey and photography of each of the eighty-three smaller textiles prior to their rehousing, using the conservation staff’s new Canon 20D digital camera, also purchased with IMLS funding.

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Over the years, conservation staff funding has been augmented from a variety of sources including the Institute of Museum and Library Services and The Getty Foundation. The Getty Foundation provided support for five years of postgraduate conservation interns, all of whom added immeasurably to the smooth working of the laboratory and whose varied, and highly trained, backgrounds added to the overall expertise of the laboratory and the museum as a whole.

In a natural progression of the conservation staff’s experience and also allowing them to grow in a new direction, the Institute, under Gil Stein’s direction, received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Recovering Iraq category to support a six-month accelerated conservation training program for four Iraqi conservators. The proposal, which received an excellent recommendation from the National Council on the Humanities, will provide a unique blend of theory and practical work customized to enhance the skills and theoretical knowledge of our Iraqi colleagues, most of whom have not had access to the more traditional training programs available to Western conservators. As a first step in determining the current needs of the Iraqi heritage organizations, I met with the acting head of Iraqi conservation in Baltimore this past May. Over the course of two days, we were able to share many experiences and exchange information. I also learned about the four Iraqi conservators who will be joining us in the fall. We eagerly look forward to the experience and the opportunity to provide much needed assistance to our Iraqi colleagues.

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pRep shop

erik lindahl

Those visiting the museum may see it as a static object that is to be observed, like a statue, or a billboard. It is not that simple; the museum is a living entity that is constantly evolving in order to meet the demands of scholars, the visiting public, and the artifacts it houses that are a part of our cultural heritage. To keep this thing which is in our care functioning requires energy, materials, discussion, the climbing of ladders, moving of stones, the careful handling of delicate things, elbow grease, and a substantial amount of cooperation. The dynamic nature of the museum is very apparent to those who work in the Prep Shop. Up here on the third floor of the new wing we monitor the museum’s condition, maintain its appearance, and construct its developing exhibits behind closed doors.

The last year has brought two new elements to the museum; the Picken Nubia Gallery and the Holleb Special Exhibits Gallery. Getting these two components of the west gallery ready for the critical eye of the Oriental Institute community required quite a lot of problem solving and cooperation. The physical process of preparing the exhibits started with the installation of new track lighting in the hall and ended with the placing of an ancient, but still colorful pile carpet into a case that was designed by Markus Dohner and Laura D’Alessandro and then built by Raymond Tindel. Some of the more difficult steps of the process were constructing the mount for the C-Group burial stela with incised cows and dealing with a very tight installation schedule. Tackling the stela required a lot of bending, banging, lifting, and a deftly handled sawzall. Surmounting the challenge of our tight installation schedule required a more calculated approach. For this we

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constructed a “stage” or mockup of the awaited display cases and preinstalled each case in order to resolve as many curatorial and design issues as possible. This preinstallation allowed us to install the exhibit very quickly upon the arrival and installation of the display cases. The installation of our first set of temporary exhibits, which consisted of two photography exhibits, was not quite so intense for the Prep Shop but due to tight scheduling was still a challenge.

The completion of all of the museum’s galleries was not the only milestone for the Prep Shop. I also traveled to ‰anlıurfa, Turkey, with Gil Stein and Guillermo Algaze in order to design, construct, and install two exhibits at the Urfa Museum. This was quite an opportunity and an incredible experience. We began the process here in the Prep Shop by producing Turkish/English bilingual graphics, which we brought with us on the plane (and almost left on the plane). After our arrival at the museum we tackled our task head-on, not knowing what the next day held in store for us. First, we pulled out all the artifacts we thought might work for the exhibit. Second, we narrowed down the field and handed over problem pieces to local conservators. While those objects were being worked on, we hired local carpenters to fabricate buildups for the exhibits. While the carpentry was being completed we constructed the mounts — who thought soldering flux would be so hard to find in Turkey? — and finally we installed the exhibits. The trip was filled with many great conversations, excursions for materials, and much satisfaction from completing our task so quickly.

Currently in the Prep Shop we are working closely with Iman Saca and the conservation lab on the Palestinian Costumes show which will be our next special exhibit. One of the largest tasks of this exhibit for the shop is the construction of eighteen armatures for the display of these striking ensembles.

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Denise browning

What an eventful year which had such an impact on the Suq. The opening of the Picken Nubia Gallery, the opening of Lost Nubia, the Rencontre, the Post-Doctoral Conference, the special exhibit of the Burton photographs, and the concurrent tour of objects from the Amarna period. They all presented exciting buying opportunities and challenges. It is so wonderful to have the entire museum open and operating at full capacity again! Our sales were up 7.5% (excluding the huge rug sale last year).

For Nubia we saw the return of our beloved frog pin, plus we created almost an exact replica of one of the Nubian necklaces in house from old glass beads that we had collected. We then had some carnelian beads especially cut to reproduce those same beads into a stunning necklace! Searching for Nubian crafts was quite challenging considering the ongoing political turmoil in Sudan. Especially when it came to finding materials for teachers. We looked everywhere for children’s books on Nubia.

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Nubian frog pin

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For the Lost Nubia exhibit we had our first special exhibitions catalog, John Larson’s, Lost Nubia: Photographs of Egypt and Sudan 1905–07. The catalog continues to sell very well.

For the fifty-first Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale meeting here in July we ordered lots of specialty books. The attendees fell in love with our cuneiform tablet reproduction and sold us out! Quite a compliment from the specialists in the field.

In February, the Annual Post-Doc Conference, titled Performing Death: Social Analyses of Funerary Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean brought in people from all over the world, so we ordered specialized books on funerary traditions.

For the exhibition of the Burton photographs we worked with the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the catalog pricing and preferred size. Tutankhamun’s Tomb, the Thrill of Discovery is a beautifully executed exhibition catalog. It has sold very well and should be a good seller for years to come.

For objects from the Amarna period, the Suq was filled to capacity with Egyptian replica sculpture, which has sold extremely well. Geoff Emberling and Emily Teeter developed a tour guide of the museum that is also for sale in the Suq.

Thanks to our so loyal and dedicated volunteers: Muriel Brauer, Patty Dunkel, Peggy Grant, Marda Gross, and Norma van der Meulen. Their knowledge and enthusiasm make the Suq a wonderful place to shop.

A special thanks to our student employees who find time between all of their intense study to help us in the Suq and contribute their varied skills: Jennifer Westerfeld, book buyer and a doctoral candidate; Sarah Hornbach, graduating this year with an MA in Arabic studies; Rebecca S. Ray, fearless mail order person graduating with an MA from the Divinity School; Amanda Finney; Nicole Lasky; and John Frame.

Thanks to Florence Ovadia who keeps the Suq displays ever beautiful with her artful sense of design and color. The famous Norma van der Meulen had an entire article published in the “Senior Connection” on her volunteer work as a jewelry designer for the Suq. Customers are now coming in to the store specifically asking for her necklaces.

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Margaret schröeder

The year 2005/2006 has seen the opening of the Picken Nubia Gallery and the Holleb Special Exhibit Gallery, the last two spaces of the museum to open to the public. We can now tell visitors, with justifiable pride, that all the museum galleries are open, and that they can see everything by taking a circle through the galleries starting with the Jannotta Mesopotamian Gallery and ending with the Holleb Special Exhibits Gallery. In addition, we have seen the smooth changeover between the first two temporary shows, from Lost Nubia to Wonderful Things!, with little or no inconvenience to visitor traffic. All this has allowed for the maximum amount of display space, and the greatest space for smooth visitor traffic, which we hope will facilitate the greater numbers of visitors that we hope will come to visit us now that all the galleries are open.

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The extended gallery hours, which Geoff Emberling instituted during the 2004/2005 year, continue to be popular. The museum galleries are now open until 6:00 pm (instead of 4:00) five days a week, and are still open until 8:30 on Wednesday evenings. Visitors seem to enjoy not having to truncate their visits so early in the afternoon, and we seem to be getting a new type of audience, an increasing number of visitors who are coming to see the Oriental Institute Museum in the late afternoon after having been to another (usually bigger) museum earlier in the day. And although we have not seen docents signing up to conduct tours on a regular basis during the later gallery hours, we are getting a number of smaller tours that are coming in the late afternoon to see the museum on their own. (The longer hours give smaller and self-guided groups more flexibility in being able to see the galleries at their own pace without their interfering with the larger docent-led groups that tend to come in the first half of the day.)

In late May the King Tut show opened at The Field Museum, and I am pleased to say that this is already generating a good deal of cross-over traffic for us at the Oriental Institute (18% more than last year during the month of June 2006). People come see us after having attended the King Tut show, or else they hear about us via the Web, and so come see us as a prelude to the Tut show. In addition, some people are coming to see us, saying that our displays were personally recommended to them by volunteers at The Field Museum, especially those volunteers that we share with the Field. So, thanks to printed media and word-of-mouth, the Tut show should prove a great boon to our popularity.

We had a very good group of student guards this academic year. A few graduated in June and have gone on to study and work elsewhere, but other students will be back in September to work for us while they continue their studies at the University of Chicago. And two students who completed their bachelor’s degrees in June will be coming back to the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations as graduate students in the fall. We are, as always, glad to help foster the student guards’ interest in the ancient Near East and to help them pay for their academic studies, while they provide us with needed gallery attendance and visitor interaction.

In late January, the Canadian Museum Association held its first Conference on Cultural Property Protection. Several members of this association have attended the Smithsonian-sponsored conferences on the same topic, and for some years now they have been trying to organize a Canadian-centered version of this. Only three Americans attended the conference: myself and the two keynote speakers (both of whom are regular presenters at the Smithsonian conference). I greatly enjoyed comparing notes with people from a variety of Canadian institutions and am glad to see that the organized discussion of the protection of cultural heritage is now a pan-North-American concern. (While many conference attendees expressed surprise that I was willing to come to Ottawa in late January, I assured them that Chicago and Buffalo weather have prepared me well for dealing with cold and snow. I assured them that not all Americans live in California, Florida, or Nevada climates. Fortunately, none of the conference people were there to see me slip on the ice and sprawl on my back in front of the National Gallery of Art the day after the conference ended!

The Smithsonian’s 2006 Conference on Cultural Property Protection was held in Washington, D.C., at the end of February (hard upon the opening of the Picken Nubia Gallery!). In serving my third year on the planning and advisory board for this conference, I acted as reception “hostess,” introduced speakers, chaired a session on the concerns of University Museums and Research Libraries, and spoke in a session along with representatives from Brigham Young University and the University of Western Iowa on the use of students as museum and library security personnel. The conference was well attended, and our three-person session seemed well received and garnered a number of favorable comments in the after-conference surveys.

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The board meeting for the 2007 conference was held in Washington in mid-June, and we hope that next February’s conference will be a great success. The new libraries’ representative on the board and I are planning a session that will deal with privacy versus security issues in research institutions and libraries. In addition, I will be taking part in the session on new concerns for University museums in this age of heightened security.

In December, we hosted the Chicago-Area Tourism Security and Cultural Property Protection group here at the Oriental Institute. The business meeting in the Director’s Study (always a space that impresses visitors) was followed by a lunch in the LaSalle Room and a guided tour of the museum. Although it can often prove difficult to get people to venture out of the Loop to the South Side, and then past Lake Shore Drive and the Museum of Science and Industry, seventeen people managed to find their way to campus and the meeting. (Only one person got lost en route, but he was “talked in” to our locale via cell-phone communiqué.)

The group also held meetings in other locales during the year, discussing such issues as Mayor Daley’s proposed city-wide disaster response plan and how this will affect cultural institutions, the recent threats to Chicago-area landmarks and art works, recent increases in pick-pocketing teams working among the museums along the Lake Shore Drive corridor, the proposal to host the 2016 Olympics in Chicago, and the threats to the area in the face of such gatherings as economic summits and the bio-technology conference recently held at McCormick Place. In the two most recent meetings, we have met and heard presentations by members of the state-wide disaster and terrorism response teams operating out of Springfield and the new F.B.I. Art Crimes Team member assigned specifically to the Chicago area.

Fortunately, thus far, all the fore-planning, training, and personnel and equipment improvements that have been installed and coordinated in the Oriental Institute, the University of Chicago, the City of Chicago, and the State of Illinois have not been seriously tested or been deployed in an actual disaster or threat situation. And we hope that this situation will remain the same for a long time to come. But we continue to try to think of new ways and means to protect our art, artifacts, research collections, faculty, staff, students, members, visitors and other friends, all without having to sacrifice one aspect or group to accommodate another. We will continue to try to exhibit the collections to as diverse and numerous a population as possible, while at the same time keeping collections and visitors safe and happy.

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carole Krucoff

Educational activities for adults, youth, and families served 19,015 participants this past year, an increase of nearly 14% from the previous year. This figure, which breaks every record for Museum Education, is due in much good measure to the opening of the Picken Nubia Gallery and Holleb Special Exhibits Gallery, which allowed us to share our own and other collections in ways never before possible at the Oriental Institute. In addition, a whole host of partnerships with long-time and new collaborators on campus, throughout the community, and even across the nation expanded our audiences, enhanced our services, and broadened our horizons. Partnerships

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ranging from public programs to media campaigns to grant funded projects are visible throughout this report.

Support from the Polk Bros. Foundation, the Chicago Public Schools, and the Illinois Arts Council helped us provide in-depth museum learning for Chicago-area children and their families. A new grant from the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation is allowing us to develop a groundbreaking teacher-training seminar on ancient Nubia. And a major award from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, a federal agency, continues to support creation of a wide range of online educational services focused on ancient Mesopotamia for teachers and students throughout the city, the state, and the nation.

picken nubia Gallery programs and projects

visitor studies

One special project in conjunction with the new Picken Nubia Gallery began well before the Ancient Nubia exhibit opened to the public. For the first time, the planning process for an Oriental Institute exhibit included a study to gather input from the wider University community and visiting public. This visitor studies project began with a series of discussions between staff of the Civic Knowledge Project, the new community connections branch of the University’s Division of Humanities, and Geoff Emberling, Museum Director, and Carole Krucoff, Head of Museum Education. All agreed that community input would be beneficial to ensure that the new Picken Nubia Gallery communicated effectively with both scholarly and general audiences, including the many African-American families from surrounding neighborhoods who were becoming more closely connected with the University through Civic Knowledge Project programs.

Our two-part visitor studies process got underway last summer, when Barbara Ceiga, a highly regarded exhibit evaluator based in Chicago, joined us as a consultant. Ceiga and Museum Education crafted and then spent time in the museum galleries administering a survey to learn what our current visitors knew about ancient Nubia, as well as what they would expect to see in a Nubia exhibit. Much useful information emerged from this survey, especially the fact that even our most regular and knowledgeable visitors knew very little about Nubia. Only half could identify it as being in Africa; of those who knew this some indicated they believed that Nubia’s people were dark skinned. Only one-fourth suggested that Nubia had some sort of relationship with ancient Egypt, but they were eager to learn more about what that relationship might have been. These findings indicated it would be important to develop a major introductory section for the exhibit that would provide broad geographical, chronological, and cultural contexts for ancient Nubia.

After curators had developed a prototype introductory section, the second phase — a focus group with African-American community leaders recruited by the Civic Knowledge Project — took place. The participants included Angela Adams, South Shore Cultural Center; Sheila Fondren, University of Chicago Odyssey Project; Selean

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Docents Carole Yoshida (left) and Rita Picken (right) stand ready to answer visitors’ questions during the opening of the Picken Nubia Gallery. The introductory section of this gallery was strongly influenced by the Visitor Studies project that took place before the exhibit was installed. Photograph by Wendy Ennes

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Holmes, DuSable Museum of African American History; Sheena Hunter, University of Chicago Odyssey Project; Angela Rivers, DuSable Museum of African American History; Suzanne Smith, Steans Family Foundation; and Malachi Thompson, jazz musician and music educator. Group members’ excitement about the exhibit and their candid commentary on draft wall text and graphic choices were crucial to the shaping of our introductory display.

The successful outcome of this visitor studies project is evident in the many compliments we have received in the Visitor Comment Book now in the Nubia exhibit. Almost all who write express delight in how much they’ve learned,

how enriched they feel at discovering a culture that was largely unknown to them before, and how well the exhibit’s information answers their questions yet provides food for thought and discussion. We couldn’t ask for more.

nubia programs

Public programming for the Picken Nubia Gallery began with a grand opening that took place during a weekend celebration for museum visitors of all ages. On February 25 and 26, Museum Education staff, graduate students, and guest presenters hosted close to 1,200 adults, children, and families who enjoyed an array of exciting activities. Leather worker Carol Jackson and ceramic artist Gwen Pruitt from the Little Black Pearl Art Center involved visitors in ancient Nubian arts techniques that have remained virtually unchanged for millennia. Awad Abdelgadir, Nubian artist and educator, introduced artifacts and crafts from his Nubian homeland in Sudan and presented “Life on the Nile,” a fascinating multi-media journey to today’s Nubia. Geoff Emberling, Museum Director, offered an introductory slide lecture on the new gallery. John Larson, Oriental Institute Archivist, lectured on Lost Nubia, the inaugural display in the Holleb Special Exhibits Gallery. This exhibition featured a selection of the remarkable photographs taken to document James Henry Breasted’s 1905–1907 expeditions to Egypt and Sudan.

Graduate students Laura Deneke and Foy Scalf wrote everyone’s names in Merotic, the script of ancient Nubia. Young visitors and their parents learned how to create an ancient Nubian-style mirror, and visitors of all ages fashioned and then bedecked themselves with Nubian-style headbands and jewelry.

A corps of more than thirty docents staffed the museum’s galleries the entire weekend, and several more engaged visitors in the hands-on activities. The names of all these Museum Education and Family Program Volunteers can be found in the Volunteer Program pages following this report.

The opening weekend also served the community’s K–12 educators by presenting a special resource fair that introduced teachers to the Oriental Institute’s award-winning curriculum materials on ancient Nubia. Wendy Ennes, Teacher Services and

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Nubian educator Awad Abdelgadir shares objects from his homeland with visitors during the opening of the Picken Nubia Gallery. Photograph by Wendy Ennes

A young visitor proudly displays the ancient-style mirror she made during the festivities that celebrated the opening of the Picken Nubia Gallery. Photograph by Wendy Ennes

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e-Leaning Coordinator, and Jessica Caracci, Education Programs Assistant, showed educators exciting and innovative ways the new gallery and its teaching and learning resources could be integrated into the ancient civilizations curriculum. Several teachers who attended this event were inspired to register for a special grant-funded seminar on ancient Nubia that will be described in the Teacher Training section of this report

The Picken Nubia Gallery and the accompanying Lost Nubia exhibit were springboards for a wide variety of public programs in winter and spring. During Women’s History Month in March, we joined with the DuSable Museum of African-American History to present “Queens, Priestesses, and Venerated Mothers: Nubia Women of Royalty.” This Sunday afternoon lecture by Debora Heard, graduate student in Nubian archeology in the University of Chicago’s Department of Anthropology and Curatorial Assistant for the Picken Nubia Gallery, attracted many DuSable Museum members and friends who had never before visited the Oriental Institute.

In spring we featured the Picken Gallery and the Lost Nubia exhibit as part of a new series of free public tours led by exhibit curators. Stephen Harvey, Assistant Professor of Egyptology and and Co-curator of the Picken Nubia Gallery, led a tour focusing on ancient Nubian history and culture, and John Larson presented a tour of the Lost Nubia exhibit he curated. Nubia was spotlighted in a special Sunday film showing when Emmy-award-winning producer Judith McCray joined us to present and then discuss the making of her documentary film Nubia and the Mysteries of Kush.

“Ancient Nubia: Glory and Grandeur Along the Nile,” was an educational highlight of the year. This day-long symposium co-sponsored by the University of Chicago’s Graham School of General Studies and the Chicago Chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America introduced the latest research on ancient Nubia in presentations by Oriental Institute scholars and eminent guest lectures. Local presenters included Geoff Emberling, Stephen P. Harvey, Debora Heard, and Bruce Williams, Oriental Institute Research Associate and Co-curator of the Picken Nubia Gallery. Guest lecturers included Stanley M. Burstein, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History and former Chair of the Department of History, California State University at Los Angeles;

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Education Programs Assistant Jessica Caracci (right) presents a happy teacher with the Oriental Institute’s Life in Ancient Nubia curriculum guide, a raffle prize awarded during our Ancient Nubia Resource Fair for Educators. Pho-tograph by Wendy Ennes

Guest speaker Timothy Kendall presents a slide lecture during “Ancient Nubia: Glory and Grandeur Along the Nile,” a day-long symposium for the public where eminent guest speakers joined Oriental Institute scholars to share their most recent research. Photograph by Wendy Ennes

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Brigitte Gratien, Director of the French Archaeological Mission site of Gism El Arba’ in northern Sudan; Timothy Kendall, independent scholar who has conducted numerous excavations at sites in Egypt and Sudan and was formerly Associate Curator of the Department of Egyptian and Near Eastern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Derek Welsby, Assistant Keeper in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum, London, and curator of the museum’s major exhibition Sudan: Ancient Treasures.

Both Kendall and Welsby generously extended their visits to present special lectures for Oriental Institute faculty, staff, and students. Kendall lectured on his excavations at the ancient Nubian site of Gebel Barkal and Welsby presented an overview of the archaeology of the Fourth Cataract of the Nile River.

adult education

courses

Along with the adult education programs related to Nubia, we offered many other adult education opportunities this past year. These included multi-session courses on campus and at the University of Chicago’s downtown Gleacher Center, as well as correspondence courses for those who seek us out from across the nation and around the world.

Correspondence courses, a long-time adult education option at the Oriental Institute, continued to flourish this year. Andrew Baumann and Jacqueline Jay taught the fundamentals of Middle Egyptian to more than fifty students from across the nation in “Hieroglyphs by Mail,” and Baumann taught “Intermediate Hieroglyphs” for those who wanted to continue their studies. This year, all students who completed class work assigned in correspondence courses received a special certificate of completion from the Oriental Institute. While our courses are non-credit adult education opportunities, students have been requesting such certificates for many years as a memento of their learning experiences with us.

Certificates were also provided for those who completed “Ancient Egyptian Architecture,” a new audio course developed by Emily Teeter, Curator of the Grimshaw Egyptian Gallery and Holleb Special Exhibits Gallery Coordinator. This course featured eight lectures by Teeter that were available on professionally recorded CDs. Each lecture was accompanied by a notebook of optional readings and assignments, as well as a slide presentation on the Oriental Institute’s Web site that featured full-color views of ancient sites, artifacts from the museum’s galleries, and photographs from Teeter’s personal collection. Students were delighted with this course and urged us to create more using the same format.

Nearly all our on-campus and Gleacher Center courses are presented in collaboration with the Graham School of General Studies, the University of Chicago’s center for continuing education programs. The Graham School joins with us on course development, advertising, and registration of students. It also works with the Illinois State Board of Education to ensure that K–12 teachers who take our courses receive the recertification credits that all Illinois educators are required to obtain.

This year our collaborative courses with the Graham School included: “What Can Archaeology Tell Us About the Bible?” and “Who Were the Israelites?” taught by Brian Briscoe; “Lost Civilizations: The Ancient Hurrians and Urartians,” taught by Dennis Campbell; “The Ancient Assyrian Empire,” taught by Geoff Emberling; “Mummies and Medicine Across the Millennia,” taught by Nicole B. Hansen; “From Ground to Gallery: Sharing the History of Ancient Israel” and “Jerusalem: City of Ages,” taught by Gabrielle V. Novacek; “Affairs and Scandals in Ancient Egypt,” taught by Foy Scalf; “Beyond King Tut’s Tomb: The Archaeology of Ancient Egypt,”

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taught by Joshua Trampier; and “Troy and the Trojan War: A Story Not Told by Homer,” taught by Ilya Yakubovich.

The Field Museum became our new adult education collaborator with the arrival of Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, a major traveling exhibition that will remain on view at The Field Museum through December 2006. We joined with Field Museum educators to plan a full schedule of joint programs, beginning with “Egyptian Hieroglyphs for Museum Goers.” This six-section course taught by Emily Teeter offered three sessions featuring lectures and gallery visits at the Oriental Institute, and three similar sessions at The Field Museum. The course sold out almost as soon as it was advertised, a very promising start for this new collaboration.

special events and Drop-by programs

Beyond formal courses, Museum Education offered a broad spectrum of special events and also a wide variety of free drop-by programs throughout the year. Designed to explore topics or themes related to ancient and contemporary Near Eastern culture, most were presented in collaboration with colleagues on campus, throughout the community, and even across the nation.

The Smart Museum of Art became our partner for special events in conjunction with two of their new temporary exhibits. Centers and Edges, an exhibit of American and European ceramics, was the springboard for “Art on the Move: Ceramics in Chicago.” This one-day event featured curator-led tours of ceramics on view at the Smart Museum, the Oriental Institute, and a special ceramics exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center. The Smart Museum exhibit Graphiké: Writing and Drawing in the Ancient World inspired another joint program featuring curator led-tours of collections at both museums.

Another on-campus collaboration brought an extraordinary musical event to the Oriental Institute. During Arab Heritage Month in November we partnered with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Middle East Music Ensemble to present “The Iraqi Maqam,” a unique repertoire of music that has been performed in Baghdad for centuries. Held in the magnificent setting of the Yelda Khorsabad Court, this awe-inspiring concert was performed on traditional Iraqi instruments by the acclaimed ensemble Safaafir.

Our special cookery and cuisine series, begun in 2004, continued this year with two new cooking and dining experiences featuring the Middle East and North Africa. At “A Taste of Persia,” held at Pars Cove Restaurant, master chef Max Pars served a full-course menu of delectable Persian dishes. Mahvash Amir-Morkri, author of a forthcoming book on ancient Persian cuisine, led a lively discussion on the culinary arts of Iran. At “A Taste of Morocco,” held at Andalous Restaurant, owner Hadj Akaharir invited everyone to savor the unique cuisine of his homeland, and he provided us with recipes for his signature dishes.

During the fall, the Boston-based organization Elderhostel, which provides educational programming for senior citizens nationwide, invited us to create a joint “Day of Discovery” with them for the second year in a row. This year’s program, which focused on the “Empires in the Fertile Crescent” exhibit, was a sold-out event that brought us 182 registrants from throughout the metropolitan area. Featured speakers were Geoff Emberling, who lectured on the new east wing galleries, and Norman Golb, Ludwig Rosenberg Professor of Jewish History and Civilization, who lectured on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Participants also enjoyed a luncheon at the Quadrangle Club and docent-led tours of the museum galleries. This spring Elderhostel invited us to collaborate on a new program for the coming fall.

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Informal drop-by programs offered free of charge were available throughout the year, including a new series of curator-led gallery tours designed to attract new visitors to our permanent and special exhibits. Along with the curator tours offered for the new Picken Nubia Gallery, we presented two programs in collaboration with Stirring Things Up, the city of Chicago’s culinary celebration in the summer of 2005. Emily Teeter toured the Grimshaw Egyptian Gallery to present “Dining Like an Egyptian.” Karen Wilson, Curator of the Edgar and Deborah Jannotta Mesopotamian Gallery, showed how the world’s oldest haute cuisine began in ancient Iraq. Both these tours filled to capacity with many first-time visitors who were drawn by the city’s widespread publicity.

Free drop-by programs in conjunction with University events are a long-standing tradition for Museum Education. This year, nearly ninety incoming freshmen joined our Wednesday docents for an introductory tour of the museum during Orientation Week for new students in September. The Friday, Saturday, and Sunday Docents offered tours for hundreds of visitors during the Parents’ Weekend and Humanities Day events the University offers in October. Special thanks to Docents John Aldrin, Dorothy Blindt, Andy Buncis, Joe Diamond, Stephen Esposito, Margaret Foorman, Dario Giacomoni, Robert McGinnis, Roy Miller, Kathleen Mineck, Mary O’Shea, Donald Payne, Liz Reitz Clark, Lucie Sandel, Mary Shea, and Carole Yoshida for all their help with these important programs.

Our free Sunday afternoon film series continued, with docents available to answer questions in the galleries after each showing. Special screenings this year included a Cleopatra Film Festival for Women’s History Month in March, and a showing of Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, one of the most remarkable documentaries ever made. Abbas Alizadeh, Senior Research Associate for the Oriental Institute’s Iranian Prehistoric Project, introduced and then led a discussion of this 1920s silent film that portrays the migratory journey of more than 50,000 members of Iran’s Bakhtiari tribe.

youth and Family services

In addition to activities developed for the Picken Nubia Gallery, Museum Education presented long-time favorites as well as special new programs for children and their families this past year. Four of our programs used off-site formats to reach new audiences. “Be an Ancient Egyptian Artist,” our annual summer day camp with the Lill Street Art Center, was offered twice during the summer. Teaching artists Mary Tepper and Paola Cabal led our sessions at Lill Street, while Education Programs Assistant Jessica Caracci

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This flyer posted on campus invited faculty, staff, and stu-dents to the special free showing and discussion of Grass: a nation’s battle for life, one of the most remarkable docu-mentary films ever made. Flyer designed by Jessica Caracci

Community Service Volunteer John Whitcomb (left) helps children “Dig Into History,” a hands-on activity he devel-oped for the Oriental Institute booth at the 57th Children’s Book Fair. Photograph by Carole Krucoff

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organized the art-making and tour sessions at the Oriental Institute. For the nineteenth straight season, we returned to the 57th Street Children’s Book Fair, this time with a delightful new activity developed by John Whitcomb, our community service volunteer from De La Salle High School. Called “Dig Into History,” John’s activity invited children to take part in a tabletop “excavation” to discover pottery pieces covered with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The children then used special charts to “translate” the hieroglyphs. Droves of children surrounded our booth during the fair, and John was rightfully proud of an activity we knew we would be using for many years to come. In our third family outreach program we joined with the Smart Museum of Art to present “Pictures and Words in the Ancient World,” which featured art-making and creative dramatics as well as tours of the Smart Museum’s new exhibit Graphiké: Writing and Drawing in the Ancient World.

The Department of Mathematics and Science at the Chicago Public Schools helped us develop our fourth family outreach program. Called Museum Connections: Beyond the Classroom Walls, this program supported outreach visits to Peck School and Claremont Academy, two underserved Chicago Public Schools where the parent population seldom uses museums as learning venues for their families. Each school invited parents to join their children for an afterschool program with us. We used these in-school sessions to involve everyone in hands-on activities that introduced ways archaeologists learn about the past through the analysis of animal bones, pottery reconstruction, and the scientific study of mummies. We then invited all the families to visit us during the opening of the Picken Nubia Gallery using bus transportation funded by the Museum Connections program. We were delighted when three busloads of families who had never visited the Oriental Institute took part in the opening weekend, and we were especially pleased when both schools expressed their eagerness to continue with this program next year. Special thanks go to the following people who made this program happen: Jessica Caracci, Education Programs Assistant; Belinda Monaghan, Oriental Institute Research Associate in Zooarchaeology; Catherine Dueñas, Volunteer Coordinator; Wendy Ennes, Teacher Services and e-Learning Coordinator; Tom James, Curatorial Assistant; and Volunteer Docents Kathleen Mineck, John Whitcomb, and Mary O’Shea.

Collaboration with a new partner brought us another new audience when we joined with the City of Chicago’s AfterSchool Matters program to present a special concert for teen-aged youth who had never visited us before. Funded in part by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, this program featured jazz musician Malachi Thompson and his Africa Brass group who performed original compositions Thompson had created after an inspiring visit to ancient Egyptian and Nubian sites. The young people also took a docent-led tour of the museum galleries guided by Docents Andy Buncis, Gabrielle Cohen, Joan Curry, Kathleen Mineck,

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Two students from Claremont Academy discover how archae-ologists analyze animal bones to learn about the past during a Museum Education school outreach program funded by the Chicago Public Schools. Photo-graph by Carole Krucoff

The late Jazz musician Malachi Thompson (left) introduced his Africa Brass group during a special concert and mu-seum tour for teenage youth from the AfterSchool Matters program. This event was supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a State agency. Photograph by Wendy Ennes

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Daila Shefner, and Mari Terman. We hope this event will be the beginning of a continuing partnership with AfterSchool Matters, but we will all miss Malachi Thompson, who passed away only a few months after presenting this very special program.

Mummies took center stage at our largest event for families, when hundreds of costumed children and their parents joined us for “Mummies Night,” the pre-Halloween celebration that is becoming an annual Oriental Institute tradition. Master storyteller Judith Heineman and musician Daniel Marcotte held visitors spellbound with spine-tingling tales from ancient Egypt. Docents and volunteers captivated everyone for two solid hours with

activities that included a “guess the gummy mummies” contest, origami bat-making, preparing a life-sized “mummy” for burial, and answering an unending stream of questions about the real mummies and artifacts in the Grimshaw Egyptian Gallery. Special thanks to Volunteers Rae Ellen Bichell, Myriam Borelli, Bob Cantu, Gabrielle Cohen, Debby Halpern, Karen Mandingo, Cameron and Dennis Kelley, Carl, Kathleen, and Steve Mineck, Rita Picken, Stephen Ritzel, Shirley Swanson, Claire Thomas, and John Whitcomb for all their help.

From anatolia to africa: Museum leaning for Families

Along with presenting special events for families, the Oriental Institute has received major support from the Polk Bros. Foundation over the past several years to develop a comprehensive program of self-guided museum learning experiences for children and parents who seldom visit our museum. These include many of the African-American families living in the neighborhoods surrounding the University, and the city’s growing population of Latino families.

The success of programs developed for the Egyptian and Mesopotamian galleries from 2001 to 2003 inspired the foundation to award the Institute a new two-year grant to create similar educational services for the Empires in the Fertile Crescent exhibit and Nubia Gallery. Called From Anatolia to Africa: Museum Learning for Families, this new initiative is enabling us to make the entire museum a major venue for family learning in the city of Chicago.

From Anatolia to Africa is following the development model that worked so well to create materials and activities for Egypt and Mesopotamia. Using that model this past year, we worked with an advisory panel of parents, children and educators from two local schools to develop a rich array of materials for ancient Assyria, Anatolia, and Israel — the three cultures featured in the east wing galleries. Five families from the North Kenwood/Oakland Charter School (NK/O), where the student population is almost entirely African-American, have joined us, with Marvin Hoffman, NK/O founding director as an educational advisor. Nine families from Nightingale School, where the student population is largely Hispanic, have also joined us, with principal Maureen Savas and Vice-Principal Carmen Lehotan as educational advisors. Working with project staff, the families toured the east wing galleries, identified objects they found intriguing and suggested the kinds of activities they might find meaningful and enjoyable. Later, they retuned to test and evaluate the prototype activities that staff had developed using their suggestions, a crucial step that helped

Two proud “pharaohs” tried on costumes from “King Tut’s Closet” during Mummies Night, our annual pre-Halloween celebration for families. Photograph by Wendy Ennes

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The MuseuM - Oriental Instituteoi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/...2005–2006 Annu A l Repo R t 129 The MuseuM Geoff emberling This past year saw the opening of